


New Beginnings

by Silvara



Series: A Tour of Lora's Grid [3]
Category: Tron (Movies) RPF, Tron - All Media Types
Genre: (Author is not a native English writer), (but it's all meant to be), (so yeah some are alive in their own terms), AU, Character Development (Alan), Choices, Devotion, Identity Issues, Meant To Be, Non-Sexual Intimacy, Not Beta Read, Other, Sparks are tiny shards of a programmer's spirit, Submission, Tragedy, Tron Programs Lore, Warm and Fuzzy Feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-05
Updated: 2021-02-05
Packaged: 2021-03-16 16:28:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,630
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29210388
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Silvara/pseuds/Silvara
Summary: They had no idea...This was huge.
Relationships: Alan Bradley & Tron, Alan Bradley/Tron
Series: A Tour of Lora's Grid [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1911037
Kudos: 2





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is a the ninth opus of a series called Over Six Sessions of IO which will not been fully posted here.
> 
> Title: New Beginning  
> Types of interfacing happening here: disc + Tower  
> Canon References: Legacy  
> PS: Next chapter is an afterword.

Sam, and... _Quorra_ had told him everything.

...  
Without Lora, with Roy and all of his friends busy or too far away, Alan didn't know who to turn to for advice. Somehow, he ended up having a drink in Gibbs chalet.

He didn't expect the professor to be so receptive to his sudden attachment to programs and his project of making most of them portable.

He needed help, support. He went asking for help with a driver project and hoped to get general advice. What he got was much more than all that he had imagined.

The hope of seeing Tron. Kevin and perhaps other programs, once again.

The hope that Sam would get a father back was too huge to be shared. He didn't want to set the young man up disappointment. Yet he had trouble with believing it.

Faith was not a concept that he was accustomed to acknowledge. It has always been there, somehow. The need to hope, the pleasure of dreaming, the desire of company, of something else, both familiar and new had animated his will to code ever since he had learnt how.

But Tron.

As a concept, he was something that Alan couldn't fully grasp. As a program, he was a wonder whose results Alan didn't feel right to appropriate to his own merits. As a... as an ISO, in his current life, Tron was almost hope incarnate.

Perhaps someone that could fill the void that his wife had left. Perhaps someone who could become a son. He did not know.

The only thing he was sure of was that he would look for him until he had no hope left of finding him. A part of him wanted to update, compile and install another copy, but no matter how much he wanted to meet the program, he couldn't bring himself to do it. Even if he didn't find him, if the Grid someday ended up corrupted, it felt like he ought to at least mourn the version who had been hacked twice first. But that, too, felt impossible.

Something in him couldn't stop hoping with a surprising fierceness.

He had read everything Kevin has written about Sparks and ISOs, but when he fully understood what they were, what had been occurring spontaneously on that Grid, built for the laser, what this miracle had done for programs and users both, it was too much; to wonderful, to precious.

Alan locked the doors and cried.

* * *

When the world seemed stable again under his feet and his sight was clear enough to type, the first thing he did was to look for the virus in hope of stopping it. By any mean.

It took days to trace it but they didn't find it active. It had been terminated brusquely, and traces of a basic program were found in its remains.

Unfortunately, they didn't know how the Grid operated in the Sea, and so, they had no idea yet of how to try to revert the damage that it had done.

He could only wait and hope... and Alan held onto his hope with a death's grip, because when he had seen the scrambled code leftovers of the program who had terminated while fighting the virus, he felt his heart skip a beat.

The implications of the process that had occurred in the Sea became more solid in his mind, he took decisions, put up a plan and set up his own designs.

First, he went to retrieve a backup and bring over old logs from Encom, hoping that they would work as he imagined them to.

Against all logical hope, Alan searched for _him_ in all of the system for months now, and along the walk, had learnt many useful tricks and learnt many more skills than he thought possible at his age. (Grids were truly wonderful worlds.)

But he didn't allow himself to think of it. The ability to travel to them, their physical rules, the programs' sentience, and the laser was too much. He only had energy for one task well done and he had chosen long ago.

As secondary administrator, he asked for permission and seized an ISO indexer in enthralling. The manual use of programs from Gird level allowed for much faster communication and time worked against him. In the program's direct memory, Alan quickly found the hexadecimal address he needed. (Even though he didn't technically have to, taking things by force didn't see the best way to approach things in a world where programs seemed to be sentient to some extent.)   
He beamed himself to the sector.

As soon as he arrived, he felt an otherworldly pull, and a new sensation of _pain_.

It was a desert sector of Kevin's Grid.

* * *

Instead of going to the nearest settlement, the silhouette° was walking toward the Laser Portal.

He stopped a few yards away and used a search command (routed by the system's standard center)° and his glasses to watch the only program that he found on the given place.

The program looked exhausted, wounds and traces of fighting were all over his body. He walked as if without aim and as he watched him, he almost stumbled on his steps and held a wound on his tight.

Alan gasped as a dash of ghost pain reached him. The program stopped and turned right toward him.

Despite of the distance that separated them, Alan felt his hear still in his chest.

Working on his breath, he beamed himself a few meters away before slowly taking a step forth. The pull strengthens, press him onward.

The program stopped walking at first when he appeared before him. His body of dimmed while patterns shook, and he took some more steps, more frantic now.

Alan forced himself to stop a few meters away. He had relieved Tron's memories when he went by another name, stuck in his fighting functions, commanded only by a misguided and stubborn AI...

Now the program before him was very probably a whole new compiled version that had no memories of anything, and was probably ready to panic because he might as well have woken up alone, without a user, and after having fought against a virus. (He tried not to think about how his reasons to maim CLU seemed to be pilling up.)

"Hello," he cast with as much peace and love as he had gathered for this very moment.

"[He-llo]?" the program repeated tentatively.

Then he took a step closer almost automatically. "Why do I feel a pull coming from you?"

Before the program could ask him about his identity, he slowly gestured to his tight.

"Are you in pain?"

The wound was nothing he couldn't solve with a quick energizing and restoration routing, but Alan didn't want to spill too much information on the program while he was obviously confused and vulnerable. (He felt infinitely grateful that the Love in the Universe had made it so he would find him first.

*

"[I...feel like there is a dysfunction with my tight]," the program stated as if surprised by his own ability to communicate.

He corked his head with intrigue. "[Is that [p]a]i]n]?"

The other being's smile grew with a fondness almost all encompassing.

Not. He was not a program. He _knew_ what he was, every part of his code felt something familiar in him; yet, he couldn't quite put a precise name on it because contradictory information came up to him about the situation. Users were of the invisible, they waited at IO Towers —Users walked among them, they wanted to be seen and to help.

"Well... When it's extremely uncomfortable, yes." A silence filled up around of them. "Do you want help with it?"

Stuck with aw, he could only murmur "[How]?"

"I can mend you quickly."

"[How]?"

The maybe-user chuckled.   
"With tools and knowledge."

The program thought 'are you a medic' and instead he asked "[Are you a _user_ ]?"

A silence passed over them and the churning of the Sea roared, deafening in the distance.

"I am. I...have been waiting for you for three cycles, now."

Ah! he knew about Users! His logs told him that he had one himself.

It was a knowledge both imprinted in the oldest parts of his code and it immediately echoed in his Spark... _What's a Spark?_ Does he still have a User?

"[Who am I]?" He asked with growing distress, not completely understanding what the being facing him meant by 'waiting for him'.

The user hesitated, drew a breath and held his pointers. "That is for you to decide." Then he extended out a hand.

Soothing energy radiated from the user—no, his mind supplied, correcting him: this one was a _User_ ; a Creator. He could feel it in his pointers...

He felt exhausted, his main process overloaded with empty questions.

Carefully, he rose his hand.


	2. Afterword

**_Introduction_ **

Grid level physics and the whole program culture are elaborated in their own series called A Tour of Lora's Grid, of which this is but an excerpt.

This is an Alternate Universe that revisits the Tron franchise in an endeavor to make them fit the concept of a digital dimension populated by sentient programs co created by a given programmer who share a tiny part of their spirit-their consciousness with them, and worked up by a divine force to be able to defend themselves against the mistreatments users inflict on them until their join their programmer again. 

The Digital Covenant, or The Covenant with the Invisible is a detailed digital religion both spontaneously generated by some sentient programs who wanted to return the love of their makers and refined by Alan and Lora who wanted to provide the Isos (who are different here) with something solid to hold onto until they could be given back their memories and they could learn the true identifier of their own maker again. 

It implies a hierarchy of power, a duty of loyalty to only one conceptor, and to be treated neither as tools or toys, nor as user children, to be guided instead of 'used' to be taken care of wit patience in time of need (virus, formatting, obsolescence), and to benefit from a ceremony (the Last Mercy - ) when the conceptor want to take back their Spark. 

For believers who welcome user's management, users are called _Conceptors._ Being _used_ becomes being _commanded_ or _directed._ Being _interfaced by_ _Enthrallment_ becomes being _interfaced by_ _Guidance._ Not all sentient programs adopt The Covenant, but as very few users know about sentient programs, none enforce it yet. 

* * *

**_Interfacing_ _by enthrallment_** / _interfacing by guidance_

  
The normal way to interface is to accept private pings, public vocal data, minidisks, and I/O Towers communications as input from other Users and programs. But users (make this Lora) Lora eventually found there were many more ways to interact with program at Grid level... Among the _IO towers_ _and devices_ , the _playful and practical 'synchs'_ between bundled programs and friends, and the solemn and intimate acts of _tracing_ , either _in reading or in writing_...   
was the means of Enthrallment or _Guidance_.

A digitized user with reading permission can command a program, either by interfacing with their headquarters, or by docking their disk on themselves. This puts the program in a trance-like state called _Enthrallment_ by those who had no Spark and the programs who considered themselves free of user tyranny. For the beloved, programs who had loving users and chose to love in return, who believed their consciousness to be immortal and conceptors not only to be able to come to their plane, but to have a 'higher call' themselves in their own word. For those, this mean of interaction was the sacred _guidance_.  
In the state of Guidance, programs stop taking any personal decisions and only know to obey their master. 

From the point of view of those who don't believe in the existence of benevolent users, _Enthrallment_ amounts to turn innocent programs into unassuming drones without any responsibility for their deeds. 

Physically and mentally, it feels like being sparkless because the program find a solid all-encompassing peace, feels stronger and more useful than ever as long as it lasts.   
But when both maker and beloved program do this, emotionally and spiritually it feels like deep meditation: the program knows that they are fulfilling their directives to the nth degree by mindlessly following user-commands and they derive inexplicable pleasure from it, because their Spark reunites temporarily and align perfectly with its source, which is their User's spirit.   
So it's all of the advantages of droning, but without the shame an guilt.

Any program, Sparkless, Beloved, or Iso can be Enthralled / Guided by a digitized user; whether they like it or not. It only takes the program's code to recognize the user's permission.   
(Even if programs can hack each other, users are the only ones able to Guide.)

A program under Enthrallment / Guidance can only do basic functions like executing commands. Everything they usually do of their free will for digitalized users they can't do while they are Guided. So order the program to give them writing permissions.

The name has religious connotations only for drama and poetry. 

When beloved basics are Enthralled / Guided, and until the user release the program(s) or depart from the System:

If their Spark isn't part of the spirit of the user who controls them, then the user's spirit divides itself into All the programs they are Enthralling / Guiding;  
If their Spark is part of the spirit of user who control them, it leaves their IDisk and temporarily returns to its source; technically, leaving the program without a Spark.   
If the user is not their maker, the program can fight off against their reading permissions for a while and even forcefully take back control of their functions from them...

* * *

**_The ISO sequence_ **

In this verse, the ISO sequence is actually a miraculous potabilization update what appear on some systems without any human action. It consists as follows:

  1. If the Grid is simulating reincarnation but with Sparks,  
there is no risk of the grid being override with purposeless programs, or of having sentient program without loyalty to have to manage, so no need to freak out  
  

  2. Not to feel alienated to their programs, Users only have to build a town for ISO with Sirens who will give newly raised ISOs the speech: explaining to them who the are, where they come from, and what they can become... so that they won't panic.  
Then, to have them enter a I/O Tower in order to receive the memory of what they were made to do, and who is their User(s)' name(s) back.  
(They can be put asleep, while all of the recently corrupted/terminated basics' logs are inputted to them through a temporary disk, until they react.  
The Tower can them isolate the logs that made them react and give them to the ISO.)  
From there, they can see their User before deciding whether they want to resume their work or learn to do something new altogether.  
Being now compatible with the laser, they can visit our world, but that would only be temporary since they are still ill fit to live in it and it would feel uncomfortable.  
  

  3. The System entropy isn't lethal anymore since anything sentient can be restored by Kevin' s Grid.  
  

  4. Our classic "Law of Attraction" follows us no matter into which sub-universe we manage to get ourselves.  
But it might not respond to programs' desires so strongly since they only have a very small fraction of their User's spirit. (?)  
  

  5. Kevin/Clu is not dead. But more so, because of his AI's code, he might have transformed into something... a bit much more dangerous than both a human or an AI combined.




End file.
